Classic Couture: Iconic European Chairs

Our design intern, Chelsea, is running down a list of some of our favorite European designs at Weisshouse. 

Grande Papilio Armchair, Naoto Fukasawa

Fukasawa developed a way of thinking called “Outline”. Outline is about defining the boundaries of relationships between objects, people and the environment. Today, Fukasawa is in Tokyo with a small team, collaborating with many international leading companies, a professor at Musashino Art University, and a visiting professor at Tama Art University.

LC4 Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Charlotte Perriand

The ever so famous “resting machine” designed in 1928. One year earlier, at age 24, Charlotte Perriand approached Le Corbusier’s asking for a job and was swiftly rejected with the now infamous line, “We don’t embroider cushions here.” This closed door didn’t stop her. She designed a bar made of curved steel, glass, and aluminum for the roof of Paris’ Salon d’Automne, the annual design festival. Pierre Jeanneret, Le Corbusier’s cousin and collaborator, brought him to see her design. Le Corbusier was so impressed, that he apologized and hired her as a furniture designer.

Charlotte Perriand posing on the LC4 Chaise Lounge at the Salon D’Automne, 1929. It was at that design festival two years earlier that Le Corbusier had hired her.

Caprice, Philippe Starck

Philippe Starck has a mission and a vision: creation, whatever shape it takes, must make life better for the largest number of people possible. He lives by the approach, “No one is forced to be a genius, but everyone has to take part.” Starck’s designs extend beyond ergonomic furniture, including  products such as lemon squeezers, to revolutionary mega-yachts, micro wind turbines, electric cars, and hotels that aspire to be wondrous, stimulating and intensely vibrant places.

Red and Blue, Gerrit T. Rietveld

The original chair was constructed of unstained beech wood and was not painted until the early 1920s. Fellow member of De Stijl and architect, Bart van der Leck, saw his original model and suggested that he add bright colors. He built the new model of thinner wood and painted it entirely black with areas of primary colors attributed to De Stijl movement.

Zig Zag 280, Gerrit T. Rietveld

Designed in 1934, this natural cherry, gravity defying chair is one of Rietveld’s most famous designs. Zig-zag is built with four panels that bend in sequence of an elegant dance to create what may at first seem an unstable chair, though in reality is very stable. Many knock-offs will show hardware but the original composition of the chair is flush and seamless.